UnAddicted to You: Loving Yourself Through the Darkness

By Etel Leit

★★★★★ "A must-read: shift your view on how it feels to be in depression!" - Reader review___

When Ella, a former Israeli intelligence commander, finds herself lifeless on the bathroom floor, she realizes it is time to make a drastic change in her seemingly "perfect" life.<

• Language: English
• Publisher: SignShine
• Release date: Mar 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9780988595279

Etel Leit

Dr. Etel Leit is a transformational empowerment leader and pediatric communication consultant. In addition to being the Founder and Owner of SignShine®, a communication center for individuals and families, Etel is a communication advocate, motivational speaker, parenting consultant, and a reupdated author. Etel a widely sought-out speaker at many conferences, workshops, and events across the world. Etel draws from her extensive background in education and writing curricula, as well as her research on sign language and parenting.Etel Leit served as a commander in the Israeli Intelligence. She received her BA in languages from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem and her Masters in Leadership and Education from Pepperdine University, Malibu.Her vast knowledge, coupled with her unmatched passion, allows her to stand out as a truly inspirational leader and speaker.

Book preview

Roots

Each one of the twenty-one chapters is built on three consonants, a triliteral root. In the Hebrew language, as in other Semitic languages, most words are based on a root with a combination of three consonants. These words will be headlining each chapter and symbolically express the story and the theme in the chapter.

Combining the three consonants with the addition of various vowels creates distinct words from the same root family. Several words can be created from the same root, sometimes expressing multiple meanings.

Chapter 1

Into the Light

Los Angeles, September 2012

A big thump. One second of falling on the cold bathroom floor in slow motion and like rapidly collapsing dominoes, images captured on the slowest shutter speed mode, at a rate of hundreds of frames per second. One frame at a time. First, my weak legs, then my hips, followed by my boneless torso and arms, and lastly, my head, nearly crashing into the toilet seat rim, missing it by half an inch. I collapse onto the bare tile floor, motionless.

An eternity of loud silence.

I try to open my heavy eyes slowly, but they insist on remaining half-closed. My body is sinking onto the bare bathroom floor as I feel gravity with all its might as the corner of the cold tile floor is staring at me. My eyelashes flutter with the dust specks of a sunray glaring from the window.

My ice-cold body is fossilized on the hard floor.

Time has stopped.

Get up. Move. Talk, I command myself without moving my lips.

My body does not respond. My hands are frozen. My legs are motionless. I feel nothingness.

Now I see. I see it.

Beautiful, glowing, vibrant.

The whitest, brightest, shiniest, and most shimmering Light I have ever seen on the horizon appeared. It is calm. The entity within me craves to reach out to it. Touch it. Feel it. But the Light is too far. I want to soar into its beautiful core, immerse myself in it. I want to become one with the Light.

The Light gets stronger. Brighter.

The essence of the Light calls out to me, Come, my little child, come to me. It is the loudest voice I have ever heard – clear, comforting, powerful, loving – and yet has no voice. I get closer by the second, syncing myself to the Light’s speed. My being knows this Light. It is the place of total serenity, of kindness, of unconditional love – this is the place I’ve been yearning for since I was born. This is the place where I want to return.

I know love now. I know I’m home. I know I can trust.

Bigger. Brighter.

Expanding. Vibrating.

Closer. Warmer.

I keep flying and floating. Up, up, up. Bodiless, boundless, and limitless. Faster than time. The closer I get, the Light lovingly glows all the more brilliant.

Take me.

My voice within me reassures me, Home. This is Home. I recognize it from years ago before I came here. I am complete. This is my deepest, unspoken, most intuitive familiarity. I am free of pain. My heart is free – at last.

Bigger.

Brighter.

Whiter.

Shiner.

Calmer.

Consoling. Hugging. Loving.

Take me.

Almost there.

Home.

Chapter 2

Passionate Cycles

Jerusalem, the 1970s

My mother’s passion – or better yet, her obsession – was long hair. Our hair was her status symbol; the shinier, longer, and healthier her four girls’ hair, the more content Mother was. All she seemed to want was thick and soft waves of goodness dancing in her hands like an ocean of silk.

As for my mom, she loved her hair cut shoulder-length in the latest style of Farrah Fawcett. Mother’s layered hairstyle highlighted her high cheekbones. Women envied her for this exquisite feature. She looked naturally elegant while the other women exhausted all the beauty parlors in the city, searching for the perfect blush to mirror Mother’s elegance. Matching her iridescent pale skin and hazel eyes, she bleached her hair blonde. She refused to reveal the tiniest glimpse of rebellious dark roots – especially before the holidays when Dad would come back home from his long trips.

Strangers secretly glanced at her, but she didn’t even notice them. She fixated on one thing: Dad’s rare and affectionate compliments.

We, the four girls, olive-skinned like our Dad, were allowed to let our long hair down only on the weekends. Away from the lice, away from the boys.

Before you part the hair to three sections, Mother instructed, brush it extremely well.

The thick wool brush was bulky in my little six-year-old hands. I held it tightly in my palm to satisfy Mother’s desire. It was time. I was the eldest girl and was about to be crowned as their hair braider.

"Good girl, Ella, my sister’s hair became velvety, like mom’s heart. Part the hair here, exactly down the middle." While Sharon sat on the chair in front of me, I focused on her hair, parting the long hair with a fine comb. I drew a perfect line on her scalp, from her forehead to the back of her neck, separating her hair into two equal parts.

Sharon didn’t move. I wasn’t sure who wanted it to end faster, her or me.

Make sure the two braids are even, my mother commanded me like a drill sergeant.

Remember, Ella, the braids must be tight, mother continued pointedly.

After diligently straightening, parting, and braiding for months under my mother’s supervision, I finally qualified to be my sisters’ professional hair braider.

I was born into a family of whispering. I learned early to pretend not to see what everyone else saw. Even if all the adults whisper about it, we, the children, would only face shame if we dared to know. The emperor was naked, but we never say so out loud.

Push-pull was my parents’ favorite game: a relationship that lived and died with every season and every new baby. It revived itself with blossoming love and destroyed itself by viciously pruning the roots. We watched our parents’ relationship swing wildly from spring to winter, one extreme to the other.

My Dad wanted a combination of a living Aphrodite and a caretaker.  Everyone called him charming; he was a handsome man with dark skin and penetrating brown eyes. My Dad, the best lady-listener, the best compliment-giver, and the most macho of men, secretly, had the heart of a child.

He loved his real-life nurse at home. He loved her petite figure, her taste in clothes, her delicious cooking, her phenomenal baking, and her devotion to raising their four daughters and, later, their two sons. He was proud of her. He admired her way of making things happen, how she looked slender while still giving birth almost every year, and he loved her laugh, although he rarely heard it. But he also loved other women. My mom was busy with raising, cooking, baking, dieting, cleaning, organizing, working. He needed someone to pay attention to his soul, to him, to the little boy inside him. So he opened his eyes and found forbidden affection from other young women.

Too smart, said the kindergarten teacher to my parents, your daughter will go to first grade.

This statement began my journey of entering the first grade. I had a backpack bigger than me, a deep dimple, and smart eyes. I learned to love school more than my home. I immersed myself in books, homework, and learning. I escaped into worlds of letters, words, and numbers.

Spell CAKE, mom would instruct me while putting the flour and sugar in a bowl.

I wrote neatly on the draft paper, which I put on the little kitchen table between the egg carton, vanilla extract, and the open flour bag carefully to not stain my paper. I neatly wrote C-A-K-E.

Mom would be so happy.

Now, MAKE, she continued, adding cocoa powder to the mix. My mother never used any measuring cups or spoons; she had the entire recipe in her head and knew the whole process by heart. I skipped a line and wrote on the blue dotted like M-A-K-E while my mom battered the cake for teacher Hannah. I would bring them for her the next day; she loved surprising our teachers with her signature cakes.

A little treat for the teacher can never harm, she revealed her secret.

As the cake was inside the oven and the dishes piled up, my words for my Friday quiz added up. Spell SNAKE. ACHE. SHAKE.

Every Thursday, mom’s delicacy filled our home with smells of Shabbat—a spicy Moroccan fish that she learned from her mom. The aroma also consisted of stuffed grape leaves, which my grandma (my Dad’s mom) taught her how to cook. Mother’s original recipe was red sauce beef stew. While she was cooking, I sat on the corner of the small square table in the kitchen next to the spices, oil, pots, pans, and spoons.

I watched my mom kneading the dough for two loaves of Shabbat Challa bread. She rolled it back and forth with both hands to erase the seams and smooth out the strand. Then she put it aside to allow the dough to rise. After this process, she braided the Challa from three strands, sometimes four, and brushed it with egg wash to give it its shiny brown color.

Mother quizzed me on my weekly Friday spelling test,

Aromas mixed with synonyms and antonyms; my brain stimulated with my mom’s love of cooking.

My mom baked an extra special cake to take to school for my sixth birthday. Hannah, my first-grade teacher, took out the yummy, warm chocolate cake with colorful sprinkles from the foil paper and placed it on her table. It was time to celebrate in class before we went home. I was elated to finally join my classmates, all of whom were already six.

Here in school, I could be happy without seeing Mom cry. She caught him again. Our home was sad again. My Dad didn’t live with us. Again. But here, at my school, I was away from their stories, away from the sadness.

Right before all the kids sang happy birthday and the teacher finished putting the candles on the cake, there was a knock on the classroom door.

Hold on, children! says Hannah in her high-pitch teacher voice. I stand next to her table, seeing the class from a different angle. The smell of the cake is sweet, comforting. I’m thinking about what wish I should make. Should I pray for Dad to come back home? Or should I pray that he never comes back?

Hannah approaches her table. She smiles, Someone special came to visit you for your birthday!

I look at the cake and the kids, somehow confused.

We will wait, don’t worry, Hannah read my mind.

Curious and anxious, I go outside. No one ever came to visit me in school.

Dad! He hugs me tight. The tighter his hug is, the more I hold back my tears. He has a wrapped gift.

It’s for you! he says, choked up. I take a deep big-girl breath.

And then I notice the tall lady standing next to him. She wears a frog-green pants suit with big shiny golden buttons. Her hair is up in a bun, and she has too much blush to mimic high cheeks. Our eyes meet as she smiles and says, Happy birthday, Ella!

How does she know my name?

Here, this is for you! Open it. My Dad looks at me with proud eyes.

Slowly, I unwrap the present.

A book. Apartment for Lease by Leah Goldberg.

He knows his gift will make my mom happy.

It wasn’t the first time Dad went away. After a few months, Dad would come back home with new renovations. He painted the walls, renovated a room, or built an addition. My parents celebrated every visit by renewing their nest, which they would build together and destroy again after a few months. They were junkies for extremes – addicted to each other and their anxieties

Jerusalem, November 1977

Mom couldn’t hide her excitement.

Thursday was always a special day – the day before Shabbat dinner. But this Thursday was predominantly filled with anticipation; Dad is coming back again.

"Lee, take out the laundry from the clotheslines.

Sharon, dust the shelves.

Libby, fill the bucket with water and soap.

Ella, wash the floors.

Her voice filled our home with endless commands while she cooked. This loop continued until the house was spotless, ready to welcome the Shabbat and Dad.

Who likes vegetables? Who likes candies? We heard Dad climbing the stairs to our duplex.

Liat, Sharon, Libby, and I ran to the doorway when we heard my Dad climbing on the staircase. He sang funny rhymes, which he always did when he wanted to please mom. He smiled like a strong man perfume. Dad is here. My Dad entered, carrying ten bags in his right hand and a big brown box on his left shoulder filled with anything he could spot to fill our fridge, pantry, and Mom’s heart. We jumped on him, Daddy, daddy!

My mom rushed out from the bedroom with a new outfit and her hair perfectly blow-dried. She smelled like sweet flowers and was glowing like the sun. He approached to kiss her. Blushing, she allowed my Dad to kiss her, but only on the cheeks, because of the girls. He hugged her like they never were separated before, and we, the four girls, looked at each other smiling and giggling. It felt like home again.

Mom dug her head in the bags – ten filled bags with groceries, meats, snacks, and a big carton filled with fresh fruit and vegetables. My siblings and I organized each thing in its spot while my Dad took a long shower before dinner. As he always did when he was happy, Dad kept singing his funny songs, warming my mom’s heart.

Despite her parents’ objections when she was eighteen, my mother married my Dad, who is seven years older than her. Her parents did not like his motorcycle and the fact that he wears cologne. But she rebelled and married him, the love of her life.  A month past her twentieth birthday, she became a mom to me. We both grew up together, or maybe I grew up faster than her.

My mom took her new title as a wife and a mother to heart. Her nest home was always sparkly clean, with the best homemade cooked food, and with a treasure of books, encyclopedias, and educational games. Her mission was to prove her parents wrong. She loved her darker-skinned husband, and she loved her role as a mom, a wife, a caregiver. She loved her roles to obsession. 

My Dad truly loved my mom, but he also loved other women. My mom was determined to fix him. She believed she would fox my Dad’s problem and win back her husband from his lovers.

It was finally a whole good year. We moved to a neighborhood on the other side of town,

It was time to enroll me in the second grade in our new neighborhood. I was excited about my new school. I wondered if the teacher in this new neighborhood would be friendly like Hannah, my first-grade teacher. But my mom had never dared even to visit the local elementary school in our new neighborhood.

From her detailed description, it was one of the worst schools in the country – or in her words, the world. Her precious and smart firstborn, who had said the name Encyclopedia when she was only one year old, could never attend a low-performing, awful school. Mother was not only concerned about its reputation and low scores; at the halfway mark between our home and school, there was a shady and mysterious sober-living house. A carpet of cigarette butts decorated the entrance to the house, and every day, between their recovery meetings, the questionable addicts added more butts on the burnt trail.

Addiction, Mother proclaimed, must be hidden well.

My overprotective mother subtly persuaded the City Hall to let me attend the elite elementary school located in my paternal grandmother’s upscale neighborhood, half an hour bus drive from our home. Even the mayor could not say no to my mom. She always found a way to make things happen.

It was a year of new beginnings for both of us. I started second grade in a new school, and my mother started the job of her life. With her mom, my grandmother’s unique connections at the main hospital in the city, my mother was hired to be a drop of milk nurse. Her role was to prepare the pre-calculated formulas for premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. Mom started leaving home before sunrise to take care of other parents’ babies so they would have a warm bottle when they woke up, and I, the responsible firstborn, was left in charge of my three younger sisters.

Mom was methodical in her child-rearing routines: we were to do homework only at our desks, the family was to have dinner only around the table, dishwashing was to be by hand, and drying with towels. Bedtime was at exactly seven-thirty in the evening and lights-off at precisely eight o’clock. I disliked this the most: I wanted one more chapter, one more page, one more paragraph, one more word.

Thirstily I drank in each word of my books in bed while mother prepared our clothes to wear the next day. She organized the clothes according to how we would put them on, like an onion’s layers. Each sister had her clothes waiting for her on her chair next to her desk. The layers were endless during cold Jerusalem winters. First a white camisole, then the undershirt, then the shirt, the wool stockings, long pants, turtleneck sweater. My mother also added a vest when it was freezing. The thick socks were ready, one on each boot, which sat next to each chair’s legs. She also prepared four coats and placed them by the door with matching color umbrellas. She loved matching colors, even the colors of our socks.

Mom, don’t worry, I reassured her as she prepared our clothes the night before her first day at her new job. I promise I will make sure everything will be fine tomorrow.

She trusted me.

I woke up in a parentless home; Mother had handed me her scepter. She was already at the hospital, and Dad was away again. He was a truck driver in faraway cities and came home every few days because of the long drives, or, as Mother always suspected, because of the other cheek-less women.

While my sisters were eating a rushed breakfast and packing Mom’s premade lunches, I braided their hair into two beautiful thick braids just as Mom taught me. My sisters hated me for being the braider. I vigorously brushed and pulled and yanked their hair to satisfy my mother’s fixation.

Mother could never check if we obeyed her braiding rules. Nevertheless, we never dared to leave our home with a single strand of hair in disarray. We knew that one louse would be dramatic enough to shatter Mother’s serenity completely.

Good Girl, Ella.

Then we marched, dropping each one of my three sisters off at their destination—Lee to preschool, Sharon to daycare, and Libby to a home caregiver.

Finally, it is my turn. After I dropped off my sisters, I walked to the bus station, at the end of an unpaved dead-end roundabout, the first stop of the line route – or the last – depends on how you look at it. I rode through half the city to study with rich kids who didn’t have their hair braided. They also never wore four layers of clothes under their coat.

I sat behind the bus driver to not miss the bus stop when it’s time to get off, just as Mother told me. I saw other children with colorful backpacks walking to the local school in their neighborhood along the bus route from the windows. I looked around me; there were no other kids with me on the bus. I was a rare one.

I left household chores, laundry, braids, and dishes behind in the bus’s exhaust. No one asked me to watch over my three sisters or clean. There were no loads of laundry, no dusting bookshelves, and no drying racks of dishes; it was just me, the books from our local library, and the bus driver. I could choose the book and the daydream.

When the school bell rang at the end of the day, the rich kids in my new school walked together to their homes in pairs or groups, passing the new green playground the mayor just built. I rushed to the bus stop. My driver waited for me.

How was school today, Ella?

How was your math quiz?

What did you make in arts and crafts class?

I had several drivers who drove my route. Joni usually worked at lunch shift on the way back home, Ben was obsessed with sixties music, and Mike had green apples for breakfast. I knew each bus driver by name, schedule, favorite shirt, and typical jokes.

Don’t worry. If you are ever late, I will wait for you, Abram, the morning bus driver, promised me. If I was late a few seconds because one of my sisters was slow to walk, Abram patiently waited for me as he brushed his black curls with a special comb.

I grew up among strangers on busses, and I built entire life stories without exchanging a single word with any of them. I paid attention, collecting data like a private investigator.

The older woman with her different hats and the old brown purse in her hands always sat in the front seat. The young, very tall, skinny woman who didn’t wear a wedding ring always thanked the bus driver in a soft sweet voice after he punched her card. Her eyelashes would flutter like butterflies. The woman with the thick black glasses was chatting with everyone, even if they didn’t listen to her. She even missed her bus stop next to the market a couple of times. That made me chuckle.

Then there was the older man with the white tangled beard. He chose a window seat and used to fall asleep, leaning on it with his head sloping to the side. Once, I even heard him snoring. Maybe he had treasures in his beard; he must have been exhausted from carrying them.

The bus rides made me a writer, a journalist, collecting clues and making strangers’ lives come together into a finished puzzle.

The humming engine, the squeaky brakes, the yelling at the driver to stop because of the broken bell cord characterized my mornings and evenings. The old ladies complaining, the bearded man snoring, the women gossiping, the whining babies, and the giggles after the driver’s jokes.

Here, take my seat! people offered a pregnant woman with her big belly touching the head of another woman sitting. Young teenagers would hop out of the bus to help an older man burdened with bags of produce at the market bus stop. One teenager would bring the bags carrying the aroma of the fresh oranges and herbs into the bus, while the other teenager held his hand and helped him climb on board. The bus driver patiently waited.

Ella, the seven-year-old intelligent agent, grew up on the meandering busses of greater Jerusalem and built treasures of stories in her head. It was my private Instagram, two decades before its invention. Picture after picture, I filled my head with creative captions from second to eighth grade.

Time. You think you may have control over time. You aspire to make every minute count. Or you might attempt to kill time by doing nothing. But truthfully, time cannot be commanded or controlled. Most of all, no one can stop it.

How do you measure your time? The slow movement of a shadow across a sundial? The increasing pile of sand on the bottom of an hourglass? The constant ticking of a stopwatch? A few checkmarks on a calendar or in a daily planner? It’s a trick, an illusion. The passage of time is only in your mind.

You want an anticipated event to start quickly. Now! Time is the burly security guard carefully watching you, waiting for your impatient demands, blocking you. You wait for an occasion, a trip, a birthday, a check, promotion, retirement. Stubbornly, time holds you back. Then the long-anticipated event begins, and you devour each precious moment. Time rushes far too quickly now, and you want it to last, begging for the clocks to stop so you can prolong the happiness. And then – then you get bored. Now you find yourself waiting for the next exciting spectacle.

Admit it. You always fixate on time.

When you want something to be over – an illness, an argument with a loved one, a test, a court hearing –